


Up There, Down Here

by commoncomitatus



Category: Earth 2 (TV 1994)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-17
Updated: 2014-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-09 06:15:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,255
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1972056
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/commoncomitatus/pseuds/commoncomitatus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Set during "First Contact", specifically the Martins' first night on G889.  Bess thinks a lot, and Morgan tries not to think at all.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Up There, Down Here

There’s dirt under her nails for the first time in years.

Actually, there’s dirt pretty much everywhere. It itches inside her skin, tangles in her hair, works its way under her clothes and into her boots; it’s everywhere, and it feels like a part of her, like bone and muscle and breath. Dirt’s sneaky that way; it gets into everything, all the little crooks and and crevices, every tiny little space, just gets right on in and stays there until you forget what it was like to be clean. Gotta wash it out quick, if you’re planning to, or there’ll be no getting it out at all.

That’s going to be a problem here, getting it out. She can tell that right away. There’s no water, no soap, and nothing they can use as a substitute. No chance of getting a bath any time soon, not without a miracle or a downpour. It’ll be tough enough just finding water to drink, and that’s a much bigger concern; if they dehydrate, nobody’s going to care how dirty they are. Anyway, truth be told, she’s perfectly happy like this. Growing up on Earth, things like baths were often a luxury they couldn’t afford, and even though she’s been living on the stations for two years now it still feels kind of shallow to be so clean all the time.

Besides, she likes the way the dirt feels on her, likes the way it tastes, like grit and salt in her mouth. It tastes like hard work, like Earth, and though she doesn’t know the first thing about this strange new world they’ve crashed on, still it makes her feel safe. It’s like a kind of welcome, little pieces of the planet all over her, stable earth under her feet and dust swirling in the air. It feels like this place is putting its mark on her, opening itself up and letting her be a part of it, and she wonders if maybe it can feel the Earth thrumming inside her too, if it can hear through the pulse of her heart all the times she’s been soaked through with dirt just like this.

It’s middle-of-the-night dark, a little chilly but breathtakingly beautiful. Morgan’s asleep in the escape pod, taking shelter from the wide open sky and the dirt that he hates so much. She can hear the rhythm of his gentle snoring, distant but comforting, and it makes her smile. He’s there, she’s here, and they’re both alive. The thought warms her, more even than the fire.

Fire. That’s another thing. It’s strange and familiar at the same time, just like the dirt, and she still can’t shake the thrill of excitement that twitches down her spine as she pokes at the embers, watching the flames as they flicker and shrink. She promised to keep an eye on it for him; he’s never seen one before, and the freedom of it frightens him. _“I don’t like it!”_ he complained when she lit it. _“Exposed and open like that! It’s dangerous, Bess! It’s a wild thing!”_ She just laughed and reminded him that she’s a wild thing too, that they’ll both have to be a little wild if they want to survive out here. It makes her laugh again now to remember it, the way his eyes went wide with terror, the way he flinched and jumped back from the harmless licking lights.

Station life gets you a lot, but it doesn’t get you common sense. Morgan’s scared to death of a few little flames, but Bess has been playing with fire her whole life. Not the kind made from wood, from nature, not this kind, but fire just the same, and tending a little life-light like this comes as naturally as breathing. She’s got scars on both her hands, decades-old burns that healed badly because she didn’t wait for them to heal right. She can still hear her father chastising her about it, and smiles at the memory. _“It’ll scar if you don’t leave it alone,”_ he warned, voice as rough as the rocks he worked, and she just shrugged like the precocious little rebel she was and said, _“So what’s one more in a place like this?”_ She’s twenty-two light-years away from all of that now, twenty-two light-years away from everything she’s ever known, but right now it kind of feels like home.

That’s a good way to think, and she clings to it. Home is warmth and familiarity, and that’s exactly what she needs right now. Familiarity. Warmth. They’re words she’d all but forgotten. Fire and dirt and all the things that make her think of the life she came from. It’s the only thing she can do, really, because the alternative is thinking about the crash, and she’s not ready for that yet.

She tries to block it out, but it’s no good. Just thinking about it opens the floodgates and the memory lands in her stomach like a blow; it’s a gut-punch of horror and vertigo, that sick feeling she felt in the moment they started going down, and she braces her hands in the dirt to keep from pitching forwards. _Solid ground,_ she tells herself. _You’re here, you’re safe, you’re on solid ground._ It helps a little, and she remembers how to breathe.

She’s tried to think about it a few times since they landed, but it always ends the same way. She’s tried to think back, to wrap her head around it, what happened and why and how, but every time she tries she gets that same horrible feeling, that awful lurch in her stomach, that vicious jolt of acid and adrenaline that sours her stomach and cuts off her breathing, and it drops her to her knees every time. It’s probably a post-traumatic thing; give it a little time and distance, it’ll pass on its own. She’s seen this kind of reaction before, back home; she’s seen dozens of times, in fact, in dozens of different people, but it’s never happened to her. It’s an unpleasant feeling, crippling, and though she’s not so stupid that she expected to stumble out of a crash-landing on an alien planet without an emotional bruise or two, still she can’t help wondering how long it’ll be before she can think about it and not feel the world lurch off its axis.

Morgan’s done this before. Maybe not the crashing part, but at the very least he’s no stranger to space travel. He’s been places she can’t even pronounce, and he knows how the system works. He knows about cold sleep, about distance and time and all the rest, and he knows everything there is to know about a venture like this. Bess, meanwhile, has been living on the stations for two years and she still can’t get through a day without fighting off motion sickness. Earth never moved like the stations do, never spun in that relentless orbit, never made those creaking sounds or shifted at the slightest thing. They’re not like planets; they hang in space, ready to drop at any moment, and they never let you forget how precarious that is. Living there feels artificial, unnatural, and sometimes it makes her so uncomfortable she wants to cry.

Space travel is like a nightmare to someone like her, someone who’s always had her feet on the ground, in the dirt, who likes stability and gets uncomfortable surrounded by slow-spinning metal and precarious orbits. If he was anyone else, she would never have agreed to come out here at all, but he’s her husband and she loves him, and he promised her that it was safe.

This isn’t safe. It’s twenty-two light-years from safe. But it is solid ground. It’s dirt under her nails and fire keeping her warm, sweat and dust and stability and the surface of a planet; it’s everything she knows, everything that’s familiar, and in a strange sort of way she feels safer than she has in two years.

The stations are safe. That’s the irony of it. They’re safe and protected and good. And it’s not that she doesn’t like them, or that she doesn’t appreciate all that; it’s just that they don’t feel right to a woman who’s used to solid ground and stability. The stations may be good in themselves, but she doesn’t feel good when she’s up there. It really is as simple as that, and it doesn’t matter that it’s the safest place in the galaxy, because it’s really kind of impossible to remember that when she feels like she’s been kicked in the head, lambasted at every turn.

There are so many people everywhere, always so much going on; wherever she goes, wherever she looks, there’s something happening, and the endless queasy motion isn’t just about the slow spin of orbit or the shifting and creaking. On a good day the whole experience makes her dizzy, on a bad day it makes her nauseous, and on the worst days it makes her ache for the dark and the danger of the Earth mines. She’s never been safer in her life than she is on the stations, but it’s hard to remember that when there are people everywhere and voices coming at her from all directions and the floor is tilting and unsteady beneath her feet. It feels the opposite of safe, and Morgan still can’t understand why she sleeps with one hand on the floor.

This, though? This dirt and fire and solid ground? This alien planet in the middle of nowhere without food or water? She knows perfectly well that this isn’t safe at all. But right now, it sure feels like it is.

She looks up. This place has two moons, and two million stars sparkling beyond. It really is beautiful, and even though it’s all so far away those distant pinpricks feel like something tangible. She didn’t get to look at the sky much on Earth — living underground doesn’t make for much open space — but she dreamed about it sometimes at night, when her inhibitions switched off and sleep set her free. The sky, the moon, the stars, the whole galaxy laid out for the taking. Sometimes she even dreamed of the space stations, big and bright and gleaming, dreamed of what it meant to be safe for the first time in her life; she never dreamed about the motion, though, or all the people. She’d feel guilty when she woke from those dreams, like a traitor to her father and the people who gave their lives to make hers better, and she would stretch out her fingers as far as they’d go, pressing against the rock and grounding herself. It felt different depending on the season, cold and wet or hot and dry, but it always kept her grounded, always reminded her of where she was and what it meant to be _home_. Sometimes they were so closed in that she could reach out and touch two opposing walls at the same time, that’s how small the world was. Everything was so tight, so compact, but she never felt trapped.

She’s never seen so much open space. She’s never seen a horizon like this, distant but so clear you could cut the view with a knife, never seen stars blinking in a pure black sky. On Earth everything was hazy, even under the ground, but here it’s all clarity and focus; the intricacy is stunning, and no matter how far she looks, she can make out every detail. It’s like nothing she’s ever seen before, and it drums inside her chest like an adventure. She feels like she’s home, but she also feels like she’s not; she imagines this is what Earth used to be, what the planet must have been like before humanity clamped its teeth down. She looks up at the sky, that beautiful black sky pricked with stars, and feels like she knows this place.

 _Beautiful_ , she thinks.

“Bess?”

Morgan, of course. Even if they weren’t completely alone out here, she’d recognise his voice anywhere. There’s a rasp to it now, groggy and thick, like he’s just woken up, and she turns just in time to see him stumble out of the escape pod. He looks cranky, but also confused, and she smiles at his tousled hair, his ragged face, the shadows of the fire behind his eyes.

“Go back to sleep, Morgan.”

He frowns, blinks; she watches his eyes as they struggle to make her out through the darkness. “What are you still doing out here? I thought you were coming to bed two hours ago.”

She turns back to the fire, nearly dead now. “Didn’t want to leave it alone.”

The explanation is valid, but it feels like a lie. Well, maybe not a lie, exactly, but it definitely feels like a deception, incomplete and uncertain, and she’s not sure why.

Morgan’s blinking again, staring dumbly at the flickering embers. “There’s nothing left of it,” he says. He stops at her side, crouches at a safe distance from the fire, and squints at the crackling wood. “Leave it alone. Come inside and get some sleep.”

He’s talking sense, of course, and that’s rare enough, but still something stops her. She doesn’t want to leave the fire, even when there’s nothing left of it at all, doesn’t want to trade in solid ground for that awful escape pod. She likes it out here; she feels safe, and even just thinking about crawling back into that metal prison makes her stomach clench, cold sweat drenching her brow and the space between her shoulders. It’s that same sick feeling again, like they’re still in free-fall, the horror and the vertigo, and it’s by pure instinct that she reaches down to touch the ground, cold clean earth clinging to her fingertips.

“I think I’ll stay out here a while longer,” she says.

Naturally, he stares at her like she’s lost her mind. “Why?” he demands. “Bess, it’s freezing out here!”

“I know,” she says, though in truth she doesn’t feel the chill at all. “But it’s peaceful too.” She leans back, all the way back until she’s horizontal, until her shoulders touch the ground, until the dirt in her hair fuses with the earth beneath. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

What little grogginess was still clinging to him dissolves instantly at that. “Beautiful?!” he blurts out, like she’s just said the most offensive thing imaginable. “It’s mud and dirt!”

“I know.” She turns her face to the side, just for a moment, smiles as the earth smudges her cheek. “It feels like coming home.”

He hunches over her, leans in real close. He must be able to see her perfectly well from where he is, but he keeps on leaning closer until his face takes up her whole field of vision, until he blocks out the stars and the moon, blocks out the whole sky. He has a talent for that, she thinks, always so good at blocking out everything, driving away the whole world — whichever world that is — until she can’t see anything but him. She’s not so sure if it’s a good thing or not, but she lets her smile soften anyway.

“Did you hit your head in the crash?” he asks, and in a petulant sort of way he actually sounds concerned.

“Of course not.” She’s a little bruised, a little shaken, but her head’s perfectly fine, and if she didn’t know him better she’d probably be a little offended by the implication. “I’m fine, Morgan. It’s just… it’s been a long time since I’ve been out in the open like this. A long, long time.”

He sighs, like she’s accused him of something unspeakable, like it’s his fault she misses her home. In a way, she supposes it is, but of course she’d never blame him for it. Whatever she might think of the stations, however badly she might miss the dirt and the danger of living on Earth, she doesn’t regret leaving it, doesn’t regret choosing him. And even if she did, it was still her choice to make; there’s no blame on his shoulders, at least not from where she’s standing. But then, he’s always been good at that too, hasn’t he? Always blaming himself for things that aren’t his fault, while in the very same breath diffusing responsibility for the things that are.

“Listen, Bess, I…”

She cuts him off quickly, doesn’t give him the chance to go down that road. “Don’t worry so much, Morgan,” she tells him. “It just feels good to be outside. That’s all.”

He looks around, like he’s desperately trying to see what she sees but he can’t quite manage it. “Well, it’s not going anywhere, is it?” he says instead. “It’ll still be here in the morning for you to moon over. And I bet it’ll feel a whole lot better when you’re rested, too, so you might as well come inside and get some sleep.”

“In a while,” she says.

She doesn’t mean it, though, and he can tell. “Bess…”

“In a while, Morgan.”

He knows better than to argue with her when she’s got her mind set on something, but that doesn’t stop him from throwing up his arms like a toddler throwing a tantrum. It’s not really her he’s losing patience with, she can tell; whether he wants to admit it in front of her or not, the situation’s getting to him, and she’s thick-skinned enough not to be offended when he vents that frustration at her.

“Suit yourself,” he snaps, swinging to his feet. “You can stay out here and freeze to death if that’s what you want, but I’m going back inside where it’s warm and safe.”

There’s that word again, _safe_ , and her jaw tightens. “You do that.”

Of course he doesn’t, at least not yet, but then she didn’t really expect him to. He talks a good game, even plays one on occasion, but he’s never been able to back down when she calls his bluff. She’s got more power over him than either of them will ever admit, and though he clearly thinks she’s being unreasonable he still loves her too much to leave her side until the air is cleared. She had him from the moment he came out of that pod, and they both know it. Still, there’s no point in rubbing it in so she just smiles to herself and watches as he paces, getting out his aggression in the only way he can, circling the remains of the fire at a cautious distance and tugging furiously at his hair.

“It’s _cold_ , Bess!”

She chuckles, shaking her head, and reaches for a half-burned stick of wood. He flinches as her fingertips get a little too close to the blackened fire-touched part, and she laughs again, relishing the echo of heat. “I know it is.”

He paces a few more times, and she watches, eyes half-lidded. She’s more tired than she wants to admit, and there’s a part of her that can’t help thinking he has a point. The pod is secure, even if it is a little dented from the crash, and she knows that she should join him in there, that’s their surest bet for keeping safe and warm. And yet, even knowing all that, it’s still more than she can do just to turn around and look at the thing, the gleaming metal prison that held her in place, strapped down and terrified as they plummeted. Even just thinking about it is enough to threaten that sick horrible feeling again; how the hell is she supposed to spend a whole night in there?

It’s not really rational. She knows that well enough, but it doesn’t really change anything. She’s so much braver than he is, at least in most things, but this paralyses her where he doesn’t seem to give it a second thought. The pod is safe; it’s a haven, a shelter against the cold and protection from any creatures that might be lurking out there. It’s a good place to lay down and rest, and that’s all he sees. Honestly, it’s what she should be seeing too; she’s the survivor, not him, and she should know better even in the places where his station superiority blinds him, but in this she just can’t do it. She can’t. For once, he’s the one seeing the things that she stubbornly wants to ignore.

Morgan always feels safest when he’s surrounded by metal. Even now, even when it’s the same metal that could’ve become their coffin, he’d sooner be back inside there than out here in the open. He’s not thinking about the crash, she can tell; he probably doesn’t even realise that the thing he calls ‘safe’ might well very have been their final resting place. When he looks at the escape pod, he sees the stations. He sees a lifeline in that metal prison; he sees _home_ , just like Bess feels the Earth when she lies back and lets the dirt crawl its way under her skin. She doesn’t want to take that sanctuary away from him, but she can’t share it either. There’s nothing sacred for her in metal, and the last thing she needs is to think of the stations when she’s already feeling weak.

He is right, though. She knows that. The pod is safe, that’s a fact, and it’s also a fact that being out here is not safe at all. They don’t know what’s out here, what kind of creatures or natural disasters prowl this planet, and sleeping under the stars isn’t very romantic at all when it might kill you. He’s right and she’s wrong, but knowing that isn’t enough to change it. The escape pod is safe, just as the stations were, but Bess is so scared she can barely breathe.

“You should go back inside,” she tells him.

For a moment or two he looks conflicted, like he wants to stay because he knows it’s the right thing to do, but neither of them are naive enough to expect that his chivalry will last when he’s been granted permission to play the coward. He’s loyal to a point, all bark and no bite most of the time, but when she offers him an escape route they both know he’ll take it without so much as blinking. Still, it’s admirable that he tries, that he holds himself still even just for a few moments and makes the effort to do right by her. It’s more than he usually manages, anyhow, and she’s genuinely grateful.

“It’s cold,” he whines again, like he needs to repeat the words to validate them, like he needs to assure himself that that’s a good enough reason to leave his wife outside on a strange planet all alone.

Bess sighs, and sits up. She toys with the stick for a moment, turning it over in her hands, the blackened curves pressing against the places where the old fire scars lie pale and exposed. They don’t connect quite right; she never burned wood, and the fires she used to know were different from this one, but burning is still burning no matter the source and fire-touched souls have a way of fitting together. The stick settles neatly against her palm, cool now in the night air, and her fingers twitch with the memory of hotter flames, of darker nights and colder earth, of a place so much like this and yet so far away.

“I’m not cold,” she says.

He snorts his derision. “That’s because you’re crazy.”

 _True enough_ , she thinks, and shrugs. “Probably.”

There’s a quiet kind of tenderness in him when he crosses back to her side, though he still gives the dying embers a wide berth. He’s still nervous around it, and the irony of that kicks like a revelation in her chest. Fear is a strange thing, she thinks, and doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Morgan’s scared of a half-dead fire and she’s scared of a grounded escape pod. Between them, it’s a miracle they survived at all. Still, he’s so open with his fear, just as he’s open with everything, and it lights up a determination in her to be the same.

“I don’t want to go back in there, Morgan,” she confesses, and hears him groan.

She feels exposed, admitting it like that, and she expects him to shoot her down like he usually does when she opens herself up. She expects him to roll his eyes, shake his head, launch into one of those irritable diatribes about how silly she’s being. She expects him to be cruel — unintentional, of course, but inescapable — like he was when they woke from cold sleep. She felt so strange then, dissociated, like her body wasn’t her own any more, like her soul had grown older while her face stayed the same; she’d felt terrible, but so had he, and his moodiness had won out over hers in the end, just like it always does.

That’s the thing about Morgan. It always takes so long for him to stop and think, to realise what he’s doing. It always takes so long for him to remember that she’s human, that she has feelings and that all she wants is for him to take them seriously. It always takes so long, and that’s what she expects now. She expects another moment like that, another in the endless stream of altercations where she has to tell him to be sensitive and he has to apologise and blame nonexistent work stresses for distracting him. She expects the same old story they’ve played out a thousand times, but this time it’s not there. He doesn’t roll his eyes, doesn’t make any sarcastic comments, doesn’t launch into a diatribe. He just shakes his head and looks so sad that it steals her breath.

“I know you don’t,” he says, very softly.

That surprises her, and the surprise in turn makes her feel ashamed; as deeply as she loves him, she never quite manages to give him the faith he deserves in moments like this. “You do?”

“Of course I do.” He sounds a little hurt, though to his credit he doesn’t pressure her to apologise the way she does when it’s him. “You’re the one with the common sense, Bess, not me. It doesn’t exactly take a genius to figure out that something isn’t right when I’m being reasonable and you’re being bull-headed.”

She smiles, touched. “I love you.”

He crouches down, kisses her lightly. “Look,” he says. “We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to.” What he means, of course, is _‘I don’t want to talk about it, because talking about things makes me uncomfortable’_ , but she appreciates the effort to make it about her. “But we’re grounded now. It’s not like we can crash again.”

“I know that,” she says, and doesn’t know why it comes out so hard, so defensive.

He frowns. “So what’s the problem?”

At this point, she almost feels sorry for him. He really is trying, really is struggling to say the right thing, do the right thing, be the perfect husband, and she’s not giving him anything back. It’s not her fault, really, and she knows that he understands that, but still she feels guilty that she can’t offer him more. Moments like this — where he actually steps up and tries to do right by her — are so rare, and it bothers her that she can’t validate him now.

“I just don’t want to go back in there,” she says again. “That’s all.”

It’s frustrating because she’s really not trying to be evasive. It’s just that she can’t phrase it any better than that. She may be the one with all the common sense, like he says, but he’s the one with all the eloquence. He’s the one with the big vocabulary, all those pretty words and big speeches, all those things that don’t fit right in her mouth. He’s the one who knows how to talk, who knows how to have important conversations, even if he does spend most of his life trying to avoid them. He knows how to make people listen, how to be understood. In his line of work, he has to be.

Bess isn’t like that. She doesn’t talk very much — she never has, even among her own people — and when she does need to say something, to explain herself like this, it always comes out in strained and clumsy sentences, awkward and untidy. She can show a little compassion, lend a friendly shoulder or an ear for listening when someone else wants to unburden, but talking is something she’s always struggled with, and all the more so since moving to the stations. She’s a simple girl and she speaks very simply, and maybe that’s okay for Earth miners and their kids, but simplicity doesn’t work on people like Morgan; he needs that eloquence, wants those pretty words and big speeches. But she doesn’t have any, and even if she did she wouldn’t know where to begin.

She knows that the pod is safe, knows that they’re stuck here, that they can’t possibly crash again when they’re already grounded. She knows all that. She knows that there’s no danger in metal walls, that it really is a sanctuary and not a prison, but she still can’t breathe and she still gets that sick feeling every time she thinks about it. She knows that the crash is over, too, but that doesn’t stop the horror from slamming into her all over again, the vertigo fast on its heels. It doesn’t stop her from digging her fingers into the earth, doesn’t change the way her breathing evens out as she feels fresh dirt under her nails, doesn’t silence the mantra in her head, _solid ground, solid ground, solid ground_. None of that is rational, none of it makes sense, but it is what it is and she can’t explain it away.

It’s not something she can articulate. It’s just fear, plain and simple, and that should be enough if only she could say that much, but it feels so inadequate and it coats her tongue like ice when she tries to speak the word. It’s absurd, because he knows it far better than she does; it’s no different to the way he cringes away from a fire that’s practically dead, after all, and she thinks about maybe asking him to explain that, to see how many eloquent and pretty ways he can find to say _‘it just is’_. Because that’s the crux of it — that right there — and it doesn’t really matter if it’s him or her who’s doing the talking, because it doesn’t change the facts. Fear doesn’t make sense, and it can’t be articulated. It just _is_.

Morgan sighs again as he stands up, dusting off his knees as though a little dirt could destroy them; such a waste, Bess thinks, and digs her fingers a little deeper into the earth below.

“So you’re just going to stay out here by yourself, then?” he huffs. “All night?”

“I think so.” She glances up at him, sees the irritation in his eyes. “You mad?”

He looks like he wants to say ‘yes’, like he wants to point his fingers and tell her to stop being so immature, to stop and think of _him_ for a change. But he doesn’t. He’s still trying, still struggling to be the husband he thinks she deserves, and he forces himself to hold his tongue.

“Why would I be mad?” he asks, and though the question is dripping with sarcasm, she recognises the effort it takes to keep from saying more.

Bess nods, sighs, looks back to the fire. It crackles one final time as the last of it dies, glowing embers fading at last into ash. She breathes in the last lingering vestiges of warmth, thinks about starting another.

“You gonna be okay in that pod all on your own?”

She doesn’t need to look at him to know that he’s uncomfortable. Morgan’s never been one for doing anything alone, but he’d never admit to being lonely either. He’s too proud, too used to his station friends looking down on him if he even so much as thinks a word of weakness, much less says it out loud. He knows that she won’t judge him, knows that she’s not like them, but old habits die hard.

“Well, one of us should get some sleep,” he mutters sullenly.

She rolls her eyes. “I never said I wasn’t going to sleep, Morgan. I just said I don’t want to go back inside that thing.” She looks around, sees dirt and earth and solid ground spreading out in all directions, and thinks of home once more. “I can sleep just fine out here.”

“Without a blanket? Or even a pillow?” He throws up his arms, sending up a little cloud of ash from the corpse of the fire. “Bess, I know we’re alone on an uninhabited planet in the middle of nowhere with no food or water or hope of rescue, but let’s not be _primitive_.”

She laughs. “I’ve slept in far worse places than this,” she reminds him, “and with far less to look forward to.”

He can’t exactly argue with that, and so he doesn’t try. Even someone as stubborn and ego-driven as Morgan Martin can tell when he’s beaten, and he gives up the fight with another flail of his arms. “You’re impossible sometimes,” he laments. “Impossible.”

“Sure I am,” she grins. “Isn’t that why you married me?”

He sighs again, loud and obnoxious, because he knows she’s right and he hates when she bests him twice in a row like that. He’s annoyed now, and it’s a good sight, as familiar as the memory of flames; she’d sooner see him sullen and miserable and know that all is right between them, than quiet and urgent because something is wrong.

She doesn’t expect a good-bye when he leaves, and she doesn’t get one, just a flurry-like breeze as his coat whips up ash and dust and cold air. She watches his back as he stalks off, back into his precious escape pod, studying the slump of his shoulders and the arch of his spine. She’s pretty sure she knows what it means, this fit of needless temper, but she doesn’t say anything aloud, just sits and waits.

Left alone in peace and quiet, she lies back down, spread out on her back, breathing in the dirt and dust of this new planet, this new Earth. It’s not Earth, of course, and she knows that; honestly, it doesn’t even feel very much like Earth, and there’s no doubt in her mind that it’ll stop feeling that way in due time, but for now it’s comforting to draw the comparison. They’ve only just got here, and they don’t know anything about this place except that the ground is solid and the air is breathable and they’re not dead. It gives her something to work from, a foundation to build up from, and that sense of familiarity of recognition in the dirt and the ashes is about the only thing keeping her from thinking about the crash.

It doesn’t matter that this place isn’t Earth. It doesn’t matter that it’s nothing like the world she came from. All that matters is that it’s here, it’s solid and steady and stable, and it won’t let her fall. There’s no spinning here, no steady orbit or shifting of the floor, no people and no noise. It’s as close to comfortable as she’s felt in two years, and what does it matter that it’s a different planet entirely? All that matters is that it’s _a_ planet. She finally has her feet on solid ground again, finally has dirt under her nails and a big black sky above her head, finally feels safe. She hasn’t felt that way in too long, and right now she doesn’t care about anything else; it’s enough right now that she feels it, enough that she can lie back and let the earth stain her clothes, let the ash and the dust tangle in her hair, let the dirt seep inside her skin. It’s enough that she can look up and see two moons, two billion stars, a galaxy of potential. It’s _enough_ , and she gazes up at that endless black sky and traces new constellations with her fingertips.

“Beautiful,” she murmurs, imagining that the stars are smiling back.

“Why do you keep saying that?”

She tilts her head, feigns surprise as she stares at Morgan’s boots. They’re weighted down, stumbling, and smiles inside herself. “I thought you were going back to sleep.”

“I am,” he growls.

There’s a string of muttered curses, and then a quiet little ‘thump’, and by now she’s positive that she knows what it all means, but she won’t let him see that. She sits up again, frowns exaggeratedly at the mass of material he’s just dumped beside her. It’s heavy and outrageously cumbersome; she doesn’t need to study it to know exactly what it is, but she indulges his ego by asking anyway.

“What’s all that?”

He scowls, but she can see through the crankiness to the real emotion beneath. “Look,” he gripes. “You might be content to lie in the mud and sleep on the ground, but I’m not. A man needs a blanket.” He waves a hand, half-mocking. “Oh, I’m sure it’s silly to someone like you. _Indulgent_ , isn’t that what you call it? But I’m afraid that’s just the way it is. A man needs a blanket, Bess.”

She’s a little confused, but not nearly as much as she lets him think she is. Mostly she’s just amused by the way he’s trying to talk down to her; he must realise it makes him sound like a spoiled brat, that he’s not fooling either of them with the show he’s trying to put on, but he does it anyway because his pride is at stake. If the whole thing wasn’t so absurd, it might be cute.

“What are you talking about, Morgan?” She already knows, of course, but she plays along and looks as innocent as can be while he puffs out his chest and tries to look heroic. “I thought you wanted to go back inside the pod. Didn’t you say it was safe and warm in there?”

“I did, and it is.” He sounds positively miserable now, but there’s a flicker of pride behind the frustration that makes her heart sing. “But _someone_ wanted to sleep out here, so…”

She smiles, drops the facade, and shuffles over to help him unfold his precious blanket. They shake it out together, moving in perfect sync just like they always do, and she lets her fingertips rest lightly next to his.

“You don’t have to do this, Morgan.”

“Yes, I do.” It surprises her, the vehemence trembling in his voice, how much this clearly means to him. She’d thought he was just trying to make a point, like usual, but one glance is enough to tell her it’s a whole lot more than that. “You’re my wife, Bess. My _wife_. It’s my job to protect you. It’s the most important job I have. Hell, as long as we’re stuck in this hellhole, it’s probably the only job I have.” Through all the bluster, his eyes are wet, and he’s quick to turn his face away, hiding the emotion before she can lose herself in it. “I’m not going to screw this up again. I’m not going to let anything else happen to you. I swear…”

She sighs. “We’ve been through this. More than once, in fact. It wasn’t your fault, what happened.”

“Maybe not. But it’s my fault that we’re here. _I_ brought us here. You came because _I_ asked you to. Just like you left Earth because I asked you to. I was supposed to protect you, and instead I got you stranded on an unknown planet in some backwards corner of the galaxy. It’s not right, Bess. It’s not…”

He trails off, but it doesn’t matter. Even if he never says another word in his life, she’ll still know what he means. She always does, can read his thoughts as clearly as her own, and though she tells him it’s because he’s an open book they both know it’s not. She understands him; that’s why she married him, why she abandoned everything that ever mattered for him. She knows him, and she understands him, and he doesn’t need to say what he’s really sorry for, what’s really eating him alive, because she already knows.

And so, quiet and dutiful, she sighs again. “It was an accident. You can’t go around blaming yourself for every little thing that happens.”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it a ‘little thing’,” he snaps, and the outrage in his voice is almost a relief after all that self-pitying sorrow. “Would you?”

“Well, sure. Why not?” She shrugs, then squeezes his hand. Dirt and dust smudge between them, and she lets herself remember all the things she left behind, all the things she gave up for him, and all the reasons why she’d do it again in a heartbeat if he asked her to. “We’ll get by, won’t we? We always do.”

“Bess.” He pulls his hand free, massaging his temples, and as she leans in to wrap the blanket around him she presses a tender kiss to his knuckles. “This isn’t a leaking faucet, or a broken-down repair drone. It’s an alien planet. _An alien planet_ , Bess! And we’re stuck on it.”

“I know that, Morgan.”

“Are you sure?” His voice is getting higher now, squeaky, like it does when he’s really upset, but she’s already used up all her empathy on his halting confession and now she’s just amused. “I mean, are you _sure_ you know that? Because from where I’m sitting, it doesn’t look like you’re taking this very seriously at all.”

“Well, what do you want me to do?” she asks, trying to keep her voice sober. “Burst into tears? Get hysterical? Drop down to my knees and beg you to keep me safe?” She allows a laughs, but keeps it bitter. “What good would that do either of us? We both know you can’t even look after yourself most of the time, let alone taking care of me.”

“That’s not true…” he pouts.

“It’s also not the point.” She takes a breath, wraps her arms around him, lets him know that she doesn’t think less of him for it, even if he feels that way about himself sometimes. “Look. We’re here, and we’re stuck, and that’s not going to change any time soon. And yes, it’s pretty bad. I’m not pretending it isn’t. But right now, Morgan, I don’t care. I don’t care how bad it is. I don’t care how dangerous this planet is. I don’t care about any of it.”

“Of course you don’t,” he says. “Because that would be silly, wouldn’t it?”

“Right now? Yes, it would.” She steadies her gaze at him. “Morgan, we’re alive. We fell out of the sky…” Her voice cracks, but she forces herself to try again. “We _fell out of the sky_ , Morgan, and we’re still alive.” There it is, just like she knew it would be, that punch in the gut, horror and vertigo and memory, and she yanks her hands free to brace herself in the earth once again. _Solid ground,_ she reminds herself, and breathes. “Forget about the rest, okay? Can’t it be enough for tonight that we’re both still alive?”

He doesn’t reply, but his hands are shaking as he pulls the blanket tighter around himself. She wants to reach out to him, tell him that it’s okay, that it’s understandable given the circumstances, that she’s been shaking too, but the words won’t come. She’s never been much good at that anyway. Besides, his jaw goes white and tight when he realises she’s been watching him, and she catches the humiliation as it turns to anger, frustration that his facade is so transparent and that she knows him so well, and she supposes that anything she could come up with would probably ring hollow anyway.

So, instead, she just turns her face away. It’s a mark of respect, allowing him the privacy to tremble alone if that’s what he needs, and it allows her to gaze once more at the remains of the fire, the ashes and the burned-out wood, one last decisive wisp of smoke to mark its demise. She inhales deeply, catches the old familiar scent; burnt-out wood smells a lot nicer than the junk they burn on Earth, but there’s a comforting kind of kick to it that makes her think of all those old fires, the scars they left and the nights they warmed. She smiles at the memory, lets herself feel protected by it in a way that she never quite manages with Morgan. _Home_ , and the peace it brings.

“I’ll make another fire,” she says, but he stops her before she can stand.

“Please don’t.” He sounds like a little boy, lost and frightened. “I… well, I think the blanket’s… flammable…” She quirks a brow, lets him know in no uncertain terms that she’s not buying the crap he’s trying to sell, and it’s almost comical how fast he deflates. “Fine. I just… I don’t think I could sleep with one of those things right there in front of me. I know it’s all perfectly normal to you, Bess, but it’s not to me, and I don’t—”

“I won’t let anything happen to you,” she says, cutting him off before he can turn this into another one of his tirades.

He shakes his head. “Bess, please.” There’s real terror in his eyes now, the same kind she feels kicking in her chest and her gut when she thinks about the escape pod. “I’m out here with you, isn’t that enough? I gave up a safe place to sleep so I could be with you. Don’t I get anything in return?” She opens her mouth to reply, but he holds up a hand to silence her. “There’s only so much trauma a man can take, you know…”

She doesn’t tell him that a little fire doesn’t count as trauma, because then he’d just point out that neither does a little escape pod; he’d be just as right, of course, but she doesn’t want to hear it any more than he wants to hear how silly he is for flinching at fire. So she lets him have his fear, lets it balm the shame of her own, and marvels for the thousandth time at how perfectly in sync they are with each other.

“All right,” she says, because the need to see him safe outweighs the part of her that would find comfort in the flames. “No more fire, Morgan.”

“Thank you…” he says, and though he’s using his tried-and-true politician’s voice, that withering sarcasm he loves so well, she can hear the sincerity behind it quite clearly.

She doesn’t really need another fire, she thinks. She has the dirt under her nails, her clothes, her skin, the earth beneath her and the sky above. She has Morgan, trembling in the fresh air, afraid of fire and his own shadow, afraid of everything outside of his metal prison, but braving all of those things to be by her side. She has the planet, this Earth-that-isn’t-Earth, this new world all around her, solid ground and stability. At least for right now, she has everything she needs.

Soon enough, they’ll both have to face the things they’re afraid of. Morgan has a head-start on her there, not that she’ll ever admit it to his face. He’s out here, he’s already facing the things that scare him, but she’s still hiding in plain sight of the thing that scares her. Soon enough she’ll have no choice but to do what he’s done, no choice but step back inside that metal prison, to choose real safety over the imagined kind. She’ll have no choice but to accept the crash, to acknowledge what happened, to swallow down the horror and the vertigo that surges every time she thinks about it, to swallow down that sick feeling and breathe on her own again.

The thing is, it’s a whole lot more important for her to face the escape pod than it is for Morgan to face his fear of the fire; he’s right when he says that the pod is safe and warm, that neither of them know how dangerous this planet is, or how cold it can get. Before too long it’s entirely possible that the thing might well be their only chance of survival, and if that happens she won’t let her pointless panic cripple them both. Back on Earth she faced more hard times than she can count, and if Morgan can steel himself for a night beneath the stars simply because that’s where his wife wants to be, then tomorrow she can steel herself for a night or two in a metal prison.

Beside her, Morgan shifts in his blanket. He fidgets, restless as a child, then finally lies down, the cocoon of fabric the only thing between him and the earth. “It’s cold,” he complains, not for the first time.

It’s not. It’s a little chilly, nothing more, but she figures his ego has suffered enough for one night and she lets him have this. “You can always go back inside,” she says, “if it’s so unbearable.”

His hand snakes out through a gap in the material, finding hers and holding tight. He doesn’t speak, but she can feel his answer in the vice-like grip of his fingers, and she hears it as surely as if he’d said it aloud: _Not while you’re out here._ She presses her lips to his knuckles, then lays herself down as well, on her back once more to stare up at the star-spangled sky. She doesn’t need the blanket, and she doesn’t want it either, so she lifts herself up and leans away, giving Morgan room to wrap himself up in it completely, curling up inside like a bug inside a cocoon or a kid inside a pillow fort. She hopes he feels as safe in there as she does out here.

“Good night, Morgan,” she says.

He only grunts in reply, an under-the-breath muttering that is lost to the thick fabric of the blanket, but he squeezes her hand extra hard for a beat or two before pulling it back inside the haven of his blanket fort. She doesn’t really mind the silence, or the seeming coolness as he rolls away from her, onto his side. At this point, the fact that he’s here at all says far more than any words could.

She watches him squirm, tossing and turning and tangling himself up in the blanket, trying to get comfortable or just trying to vent a little of his nervous energy. His breathing is unsteady too, and she rests one hand on the place where she thinks his back is, circling lightly and hoping that he can feel it through the heavy fabric. Morgan has never needed much encouragement to get to sleep, even when he’s stressed or miserable, and she hopes that’s not going to change here. He’s right about that too: he does need his sleep. They both need their wits about them if they want to to survive the days to come, and Morgan is fundamentally useless when he hasn’t had enough rest. He’s hardly the quickest thinker even at the best of times, but when he’s exhausted it’s like dealing with a kid, easily distracted and prone to tantrums.

She hopes that this world will work its soothing magic on him like it has for her. He needs rest, yes, but he needs peace a whole lot more, and there’s only so much she can do to ease his suffering when he won’t hear what she has to say. Still, though, she’ll keep watch over him, happy to stand guard, to be his sentinel; no doubt she’ll need him to be hers soon enough, and while they’re out here in the open, while she’s the brave one, she’s all too happy to spend her energies keeping him safe, protecting him in all the ways he imagines he’s failed to protect her.

It’s all nonsense, of course, the way he thinks he’s let her down, the way he thinks he’s screwed up and failed to protect her just because he couldn’t do anything to keep their ship in the sky. No-one could have anticipated the crash; realistically, it’d be damned irresponsible if he had planned for it. You can’t live your life ducking and dodging and hiding from every possible thing that could go wrong, and she almost wants to throttle him for thinking that it would’ve been a better option to take the safe route. For her, the safe route would’ve been staying on Earth, down there in the dirt and the dark; sure, it was lethal, but at least the ground was solid. But then, of course, where would that have got her in the end, other than miserable and pining for him?

It’s the same thing here. Nobody involved with the Eden Project could’ve possibly seen this coming; if they had, there wouldn’t have been a project to begin with, and then what hope would there be for the sick kids up on the stations?

Bess isn’t nearly so pessimistic as Morgan is, and she doesn’t think for a second that they really are the only ones out here. Hopefully, if they do manage to hold on and find someone else out there, whoever it is will have better luck at convincing him that he didn’t do anything wrong, but for the time being it’s just him and her and she can only do so much. Honestly, though, even if that’s all they have to look forward to, just him and her and their miscommunication forever, Bess can’t help thinking that there are far worse ways to live out the rest of their days. Of course planet living is a kind of hell to someone like Morgan, gorged on self-doubt and wasting away for want of his precious luxuries, but to someone like her it’s an adventure.

This isn’t unfamiliar territory for her. It’s not new ground, and honestly, now that they’re out of the sky being here isn’t the least bit frightening. The ground might be made up of different things and the stars might spell out different names, but planet living is in her blood. She knows how to survive on nothing, sometimes on less than nothing; she knows how to live off the land, how to keep the home fires burning even when there’s nothing left to set alight. She has scars and callouses on her hands, hardships branded under her skin, a lifetime of labour and privation straining her muscles and tightening her insides. She knows how to live like this.

Morgan might shudder at the thought of getting his hands dirty right now, but he’ll get over it when he learns how much worse it could be. He might balk at chewing on tree bark, but even he would do it if he had nothing else to eat; hell, if he was hungry enough he might even admit that it doesn’t taste so bad. He’ll learn to adapt, she knows, and there’s a part of her that’s actually kind of excited to see it happen. It’ll be a beautiful thing to see him come into his own, to watch as he learns to thrive, learns to survive, learns to exist in a way he never imagined he could.

It’s exciting for other reasons, too. She’s spent so long in his world, so long trying to adapt and fit in with station life, with all those people, all that motion, the bustle and the chaos and the noise. She’s spent so long trying to be like those people who are nothing like her, and he’s spent so long trying to make her forget the people who are, trying to turn a rock-roughened Earth girl into a smart and sophisticated station woman — a government liaison’s wife, in so much more than name — and she’s never told him that sometimes those expectations hurt. She’s never told him that it’s a cut to her soul when he asks her to tone down the underclass edge, to soften her voice and lose the Earth-grown accent. He’s so fixated on appearances and impressions, on looking good and sounding good and grooming her into what’s expected of him, and a part of her can’t help but hope that this might be a kind of payback. Maybe now, at long last, he might just realise that there are worse things than growing up on a broken world.

From the look of it, though, this world is far from broken. Earth is a harsh place to live, and from her experience it gets crueller and crueller with every passing day, but this planet isn’t like that. It doesn’t feel harsh, and it doesn’t feel cruel; it feels gentle, almost kind, like the Earth must have been before the people betrayed it. She can’t really describe the feeling she gets lying on her back out here, but it hums like music inside of her, like an awakening or a homecoming. It’s comfort, a kind of warmth that blocks out the chill Morgan complains about, and it breathes and beats in time with her body, swells in all the places the dirt has touched, under her nails and her clothing, inside her skin. It’s fire-burned scars and labour-bred callouses, it’s hardship and strain; it’s solid ground and a planet that senses a kindred spirit in a girl who’s spent all her life living off the land.

Planets are like people, she thinks. Treat them bad, and when you burn them to the ground they’ll make damn sure to drag you down with them. But treat them good, and they’ll see you right for sure. They’ll give you shelter, food, water; they’ll give you everything a soul could ever want, so long as you don’t take more than you really need. Treat a planet good, and it’ll keep you safe.

Honestly, she trusts the planet a whole lot more than she trusts the escape pod right now. That’s kind of silly, she knows, because the escape pod has already proven its worth and the planet hasn’t done much of anything at all, but it is what it is. Fact is, the escape pod is the whole reason they’re here at all; it’s the thing that _has_ kept them safe, utterly and undeniably. It’s the thing that kept them in one piece when they fell out of the sky, the thing that kept them alive when dying seemed inevitable. The escape pod brought them here; all the planet did was break their fall.

And yet, for all that, it’s still the planet that she has faith in, still the escape pod that frightens her. They’re both about as irrational as each other, the fear and the faith, and though it hurts to feel so frightened and not know why, she’s not sure she’d want to understand it even if she could. If she knew why she’s afraid, she probably wouldn’t feel that way any more, that’s true enough, but the same is true of faith, and that’s not a compromise she’s willing to make. Not now, not ever.

She won’t let understanding taint the one thing that’s always seen her through, even if it would ease the fear along with it. Better to not know anything than to know too much and make that knowledge into a noose for her own neck. She’ll take the fear, she thinks, if that’s what she needs to hold the faith intact. At least for now, it’s enough just to know what it is that she’s feeling, the fear and the faith and everything else. She doesn’t need to know why, doesn’t need to explain or understand. They’re out here, her and Morgan, wrapped up in the planet and each other. It’s all she needs to know, and all she wants to. Beyond that, all she needs to do is feel.

And she does. She feels safe and strong and steady. She’s surrounded by familiar things, and she feels those things resonate inside her. Underneath her, the earth and the dirt, fresh and clean and stable; above her, the sky and the stars and two new moons, bright and breathtaking. Safety below, beauty above, and the thing she feels is peace. This is what it feels like to be connected to something bigger, something rare and precious, to feel a planet’s heartbeat in time with her own. It’s been so long, she’d all but forgotten what it feels like, but she remembers it now. It feels like this, like warmth, like dirt under her nails and fire licking her hands, like memories of home and solid ground all around her. It feels like being _alive_ , and that’s exactly what she is.

“Beautiful,” she whispers, and basks in the answering silence.


End file.
